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Decorating the Night in Brooklyn

Kae Burke performs at a House of Yes party in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

IT was Valentine’s Day at the House of Yes, an old ice warehouse turned event space in Bushwick, Brooklyn: The three-story “skybox” was swathed in red satin and velvet, and red aerialists’ silks hung from the circus truss that spanned the ceiling. Kae Burke, 23, who runs House of Yes with her high school pal Anya Sapozhnikova, twined her way up and down the silks, while Marcie Grambeau, a 23-year-old New York University student wearing a red satin mini-cheongsam, fishnet stockings and stilts, played “Tainted Love” on her violin. Rhiannon Erbach-Gruber, 30, resplendent in a red satin petticoat and bustier, was singing from a perch halfway to the ceiling.

Forty guests lured there by a Facebook page had paid $40 for an evening of dim sum and spectacle devised by Tara McManus, 27, a costume designer and event producer. Servers and performers received a small fee, but many had worked for pizza and the chance to be a part of the run-up to the event, creating costumes and decorations. “This is why I moved to New York,” said Ms. Grambeau, grinning down from her stilts.

Armed with glitter and grit, glue guns and sewing machines, impresarios like Ms. Burke and Ms. McManus have been redecorating the landscape of the city’s after-dark underground, tweaking and honing the warehouse parties that have roved Brooklyn for more than a decade into ever-more-refined environments.

Theirs is a tight-knit community of makers and performers, who share resources — from bolts of fabric and guest lists to manpower — and some ideologies, the most urgent of which is a do-it-yourself mentality that defines a good time not as passive entertainment but as a participatory event. With roots that reach back to ’60s “happenings,” it’s an ever-cresting notion of participatory culture — that’s culture with a capital C — that has been nurtured at festivals like Burning Man and careers through New York City’s many quasipolitical or creative tribes, from street theater to burlesque.

For those raised on the New York clubs of the ’70s, ’80s or even ’90s — whether your touchstone is the Mudd Club or Limelight — this is a startlingly healthy night life scene, in which décor trumps drugs.

A few miles away from the House of Yes extravaganza, another Valentine’s Day pageant was unfurling. Larisa Fuchs, 31, had transformed a Prospect Heights loft into “The Vault of Golden Vapors,” a theme party with vintage Chinese jazz and Asian burlesque and an extravagant opium-den décor. Early in the evening, Laura Lee Gulledge, a body painter, observed over her shoulder that “glitter is the herpes of the craft world,” as she blew red glitter on the arm of Naomi Ruth, 30, a poet who had moved into the space two weeks earlier (rent: $800). Ms. Ruth was no stranger to glitter: Her new home had hosted six theme parties in the last week alone, she said.

“I’ve just gotten out of a relationship,” she said, “and I didn’t want to do ‘safe.’ So I came here, and now I’m lost in the vortex.”

Wrapped in a costume that was part Chinese Empress, part Lorelei Lee, Ms. Fuchs drifted past, beaming her approval.

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Larisa Fuchs, right, and Olga Lysenko prepare a loft Prospect Park, Brooklyn, for a Valentine’s party.Credit
Michael Falco for The New York Times

“Doing things is more fun than just watching, and people are more creative than they think they are,” said Dan Glass, 43, a freelance writer and fire-effects maker who has deployed his jaw-dropping fire sprinkler, fire whip and fire rope both at Burning Man and at Ms. Fuchs’s recent Halloween party, where he torched pumpkins on a rooftop at dawn.

“It starts with something easy — costumes — and builds from there,” Mr. Glass continued. “Not only do people have more fun, but the overall effect, as time goes on, is people feel more of a sense of community and more of a sense of responsibility for their community.”

MS. BURKE was studying fashion at F.I.T. and attending Brooklyn’s theme parties because she was new to the city and didn’t have any friends. “But I had this awful social anxiety, which meant I couldn’t stay longer than an hour at a party,” she said. “I didn’t know how to stand around and do nothing.”

So she began volunteering at Kostume Kult, a costume event and street theater club (KK sends a “fashion camp” to Burning Man each year and a float to New York City’s Halloween parade), spray painting this, stitching that, and before long she was organizing her own events. She and Ms. Sapozhnikova, who also attended F.I.T., began to hold parties in their first home, a basement in “deep Bushwick.” They bought an aerial rig on Craigslist, just because they couldn’t resist the listing, found a teacher and started performing as an aerial girl troupe. But in April 2008, a kitchen fire burned the place to the ground, wiping them out.

The new House of Yes, which they financed by throwing fund-raisers and built with the help of friends, is a sparkling event space with a three-story “sky room” and circus truss — you, too, can learn trapeze, at their weekly classes — and an enticing second-floor Make Fun Studio, filled with sewing machines, fabric, props and costumes that Ms. Burke rents out. Material for the Arts, the city’s program that offers castoff materials, furniture and supplies to nonprofit arts organizations, has been a rich source for them.

To show their indie Martha Stewart commitment, Ms. Burke and Ms. Sapozhnikova sport matching tattoos of yardsticks that stretch from wrist to upper arm. “We’re dedicated to making stuff,” Ms. Burke said.

Watching her M.C. Sunday night’s party from 20 feet in the air, clad in a red lace unitard and hanging upside down, it was clear she no longer suffered from social anxiety.

EIGHT years ago, Ms. Fuchs and her friend Jamie Kiffell were both single and investigating the then-new world of online dating. Armed with a trial subscription to JDate, they sallied forth, sometimes meeting prospects together, sometimes alone, and sending each other copious post-mortems by e-mail — which eventually inspired them to write a handbook for online dating. To market the book, they began throwing parties under the name Gemini & Scorpio, for their respective astrological signs.

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Mark WInkel, left, and Kevin Balktick, are fomenters of multi-installation events.Credit
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

“We were also having trouble finding things to do on our dates that catered to our type — our type being so-called ‘creative adults,’ meaning ‘creative but can still hold down a job,’ ” Ms. Fuchs said. In other words, she said, they wanted to make singles parties that didn’t stink. And they achieved that to such a degree, they couldn’t keep couples out.

While Gemini, or Ms. Kiffell, is now married and living in Los Angeles (“Her husband was the waiter at the diner where we hung out to edit the book,” Ms. Fuchs said), the Gemini & Scorpio parties are still going strong: there have been gypsy-music dance parties at a Coney Island bathhouse, a “circus throw down” in a vintage tent with fire spinners, and all manner of burlesque and other vintage mises-en-scène. “Nightclubs are over,” Ms. Fuchs said. “They’re too expensive and they’re just not interesting.”

At the Urban Sanctuary last Tuesday, Ms. Fuchs was knee deep in yards of iridescent tulle, gold vinyl and red velvet, culled from Material for the Arts. Volunteers had shown up to make 100 red-and-white tissue-paper blossoms as big as your head. Ms. Fuchs now has an intern, Michelle Bruenn, who was so inspired by the events that she veered away from law school to learn at Ms. Fuchs’s satin knee. “I love that I am her Plan B,” Ms. Fuchs said as she gave a tour of Sanctuary’s 2,000-square-foot space, which boasted two Balinese beds and a kissing booth that Ms. Fuchs said was left over from the adult-theme party she had held there over the weekend. “Don’t worry,” she added soothingly, “we washed everything.”

IF everyone was an artist in the ’90s, this is shaping up to be the era of the events producer. With his partner, Mark Winkel, Kevin Balktick, 25, seems poised to become the David Rockwell of the alt-events world, an organizer of vast, multistructured events inspired by those at Lunatarium, a 20,000-square-foot space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, shuttered since 2004, which might be described as the Studio 54 for the Moveon.org crowd.

Standing in an empty 13,000-square-foot warehouse in Sunset Park the other day, Mr. Balktick pointed out the remnants of his New Year’s Eve party, at which 2,500 guests wandered through a wonderland of 30 artists’ installations, including a Mylar-coated geodesic dome, a bar sculptured from ice and a room-size tent. A lone streamer lay on the cement floor, along with a cardboard box filled with moldy peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches neatly stacked in Ziploc bags.

His artist’s call — the entreaty that party promoters e-mail to names in their voluminous address books — was typically enticing: “We are seeking art projects, performers, activities, production crew and volunteers of all kinds,” it read in part. “Sculpture, installation, activities, games, theme camps, performances, decorators, carpenters, riggers and general volunteers are all welcome. A strong D.I.Y. ethic is important. We can provide the space for your project, a crowd to enjoy it, transportation assistance and a modest stipend, but it’s ultimately up to you to get it together, make it happen and clean it up afterwards.”

Mr. Balktick — who works part time in computer security and whose father worked as a stage manager for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade when he was growing up — has dedicated himself, he said with some passion, to “promoting creative culture here, that is, shaping New York culture in a way that isn’t work-oriented.” Like other producers, he is unfazed by the low profit margins, “whereas from a business perspective, not making a profit would be a failure.”

“I love that everyone comes with this attitude of ‘I’ll bring tools,’ ” said Ms. Erbach-Gruber, an event producer/D.J./musician/you name it, last seen singing in red satin on a perch at the House of Yes. “I just love the effort.” Recently, Ms. Erbach-Gruber reminisced about an Alice in Wonderland party at Lunatarium, with a white paper rose garden that guests, in playing-card costumes, painted red with cans of paint she handed out. A huge volunteer team had been corralled to paint a section of the 20,000-square-foot loft’s floor in a chessboard pattern, and guests danced so hard they erased all traces of it.

“I’ve never seen a picture,” she said sadly. “You just had to be there.”